constitutional machinery will work with ease, or that on the passing of the Home Rule Bill the disposition, the traditional feelings, and the sympathies of the Irish populace will be changed.  Suppose that A is Lord Clanricarde; suppose that X is an evicted tenant.  It is not common sense to believe that the judgment in his lordship’s favour will as a matter of course take effect.  At the present moment the Irish Courts, backed by the whole authority of the Imperial Government and the Irish Executive, often find a difficulty in enforcing their judgments.  Will English Courts find it easy to give effect to a judgment in Ireland if the Irish Executive and its servants stand neutral or hostile?  What if the Irish House of Commons turn out as unwilling that force should be used for enforcing the decree of the Privy Council as are some English Radicals that force shall be employed for the protection of free labourers against Trades Unionists?  What if the officer of the Court is in fact some bailiff trembling for his own life?  He may, I am told, call in the military.  Of his authority to do this I am not quite sure.  He must, I suppose, in the first instance apply to the Irish Home Secretary.  The Irish Minister pressed by the opposition turns a deaf ear to the appeal of the bailiff.  Application must then be made in some form or other to the English Ministry.  The Imperial Cabinet will think more than once before horse, foot, and artillery are, against the wish of the Irish Government, put in movement to enforce the judgment of a British Court, and to obtain L1,000 for Lord Clanricarde.  The matter will have become serious; the dignity of the Irish nation will be at stake; the complaints of the plaintiff will be drowned by the indignant clamours of eighty members at Westminster.  The essential principle of the new constitution is that there shall be but one Executive in Ireland.  The moment that the British Government intervenes to support the judgment of British Courts, we have in Ireland two hostile Executives.  We tremble on the verge either of legal revolution or of civil war.  An English Cabinet, I suspect, will hardly enforce the unpopular rights of a hated plaintiff by use of arms.

Why, it will be said, assume that the Irish Government and the Irish people will not enforce the law?  The assumption, I answer, is justified not only by the history of Ireland, but by general experience.  In all federations, even the best ordered, difficulties constantly arise as to the sphere of the Federal Government and the State Governments, and as to the enforcement of judgments delivered by Federal Courts.  The authority of the federal tribunals has not always been easily enforced even in the United States.  Serious difficulties hamper the action of the Swiss federal authorities.  Even in England enthusiasm or conviction occasionally triumphs over legality.  English clergymen are at least as reasonable as excited politicians, yet Ritualists have not invariably submitted to the